Tired of fake calls? So are feds

Federal regulators are targeting calls from fake phone numbers in a new rule adopted Thursday.

Telephone providers are now allowed to block calls originating from certain fake phone numbers under a Federal Communications Commission rule aimed at reducing the amount of robocalls consumers receive.

Providers may block calls from invalid numbers, unallocated numbers, and numbers whose owners have requested they be blocked, according to a press release from Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt.

About 2.4 billion robocalls plague U.S. consumers per month. A pilot of the new system blocked about 90 percent of Internal Revenue Service scam calls, one of the more prevalent types of phone scams.